Tag Archives: Project MKUltra

The Virgin Suicides [1999)

Cooped up.

Steve Bing.

Different reason.

Ron Jeremy.

Richard Branson.

Prince Charles.

Brexit.

Aria (Godard).

Kirk Kerkorian.

Al Gore.

Hillary Clinton.

John Kerry.

Nancy Pelosi.

Dianne Feinstein.

William J. Clinton Foundation.

Bill Gates.

Warren Buffett.

Epstein.

James Woods.

It’s all about politics.

Things you shouldn’t be doing.

Depression.

Suicide.

A feminine touch.

Alone on the football field.

“Obviously…you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”

Isolated and depressed.

Coronariots.

Deep state.

Start with ex-CIA.

Move outward.

John Brennan is key.

China is key.

  1.  Biological warfare.
  2. Economic warfare.
  3. Psychological warfare.
  4. Divide and conquer.
  5. “Second wave”.

This is psychological warfare.

American Beauty.

Windows.

Records.

Playing them over the phone.

Communicating through curated songs.

Playlists.

Burning records.

KISS in the garbage can.

Death.

Triple suicide on the Left Banke.

Air.

Debord.

“I’m Not in Love”.

Compare 10cc to My Bloody Valentine.

To “Armenia City in the Sky”.

The unexplainable in death.

Why.

Trauma.

Young girls like happy endings.

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.

Face like summer.

An embarrassment of riches.

James Woods will become key.

Take the oath.

Kathleen Turner from Romancing the Stone.

Olives and tequila.

Burning bricks of marijuana to keep warm.

Kirsten Dunst is Marilyn Monroe for this era.

In the moonlight.

Trip Fontaine cops all of his moves from Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison in The Doors.

Including the necklace.

Scott Glenn from The Silence of the Lambs.

Threatens to go all Exorcist.

Why did Steve Bing jump from the 27th floor?

Jumped or pushed?

Frank Olson.

Fort Detrick.

Biological warfare.

MKUltra.

CIA.

Col. George H. White.

Five sisters.

Mainly dealing with four.

 

-PD

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Twin Peaks “Demons” [1990)

Back when I played the electric jug.

“If you have ghosts/then you have everything”

I had dinner with Roky Erickson a couple of times.

Oh, of course…not just me and him.

I wasn’t that important.

Like when I lectured at Yale.

I don’t believe I uttered a single word.

But I wasn’t alone.

stand for the fire demon

I think of demons

Roky beat David Lynch and company to the punch by about nine years.

The album The Evil One.

But we have many things to address.

Harry S. Truman.

Sheriff.

I thought it was Lou Reed.

Maybe Bob Dylan.

if you ever go to Houston

And Al Strobel.

But we’ll get to him.

Because Nagasaki is more important.

Oh my God…I just ruined it.

In one sense.

Mr. Tojamura.

A few things.

Zugzwang.

Not like restless leg syndrome.

K-complex.

0-0-0

Our eyes are deceived.

MPD Qh5?! DID Q-R5?!

From daft Hallmark by the water.

Almost fell apart.

And then Lynch stepped in as an actor.

A real comedian.

Louis Vivet.

At my grandmother’s house.

From Frankenstein to Poe.

Half brandy, half absinthe.

Would be like the three faces of Tom Sizemore.

Janus with a rearview mirror.

But JFK movie as well […]

APA.  (DSM, July 4).  Demons.  Twin Peaks.  Retrieved from http://www.666.org

It all started at McGill.  With Ewen Cameron.  Joel Paris.  [unfortunate] and Henry Mintzberg.

[even more unfortunate]

It’s quite clear that our hero is Vladimir Medinsky.

Soon to be immortalized by triviality.

Is absolutely right.

Netflix.  MKUltra.

Ian “Life” Hacking.

ポカヨケ

mistakes avoid

Fumio Yamaguchi

SRA

panic in Detroit

TST

wow…whaddaya know?

Georgia peach.

Deliberately created.

Super soldiers.

Assassins.

Mesmerized morons.

Just enough to be dangerous.

Like when Deputy Andy steps on the board.  And does the chicken walk.

vs. the chicken-hawk neocons.

Praying in terms of psychiatry.  And criminalistics.

With Nietzsche at the edge.

Not the Nazis.

NGRI.

The king and I.

No, sank you.

 

-PD

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Twin Peaks “May the Giant Be With You” [1990)

For instance, I could tell you that George Hunter White

of the CIA

killed the first Secretary of Defense

James Forrestal

and I might be right.

Or I might be wrong.

Because the method was the same as for Dr. Frank Olson.

THrown from a high window.

Ruled a suicide.

Think about that for a second…

What kind of precedent would that set?

That the first SecDef was whacked.

They say Hobe Sound, but do they mean Jupiter Island?

This will all sound incredibly boring if you don’t know about Frank Olson.

Fort Detrick.

Slipped some acid.

Not very nice.  To experiment on a government employee.  And a medical doctor (to boot).

It is the ridiculous dance of death.

Staggering, staggering, walking like an Egyptian.

Boots and coke.

We don’t remember the label.

We just remember the Boni & Liveright colophon.

Propaganda.

Sophocles, tragedian.  Bernays.  Pure evil.

That’s the big question of Twin Peaks as season two kicks off.

Does evil exist?

Science doesn’t allow such.

But if anyone can convince us, it’s David Lynch.

Never a more awkward television episode than this.

A hulking oddity.

Beautiful!

As Ajax sits in the diner eating a piece of huckleberry pie.

Particularly fresh.  And particularly…  That’s classified.

Takes a long time to die from such a wound.

Dr. No says just a stupid cop.

With the stolen painting.

Hank Worden destroys television.

Turned on its head.

The most beautiful destruction.

Of the shallowest medium.

Montana.  Stanford.  White hair.

J. Geils?

And then Boban Marjanović makes his appearance.

Bohemian Club Moloch David Gergen.

Diane…

I would like to make love to a beautiful woman.

For whom I feel genuine tenderness.

tendresse

THe most longwinded rephrasing of “I am Spartacus” in the history of OSINT.

He was chopping wood INSIDE?

Wait a minute…

He was chopping wood INSIDE??

Miguel Ferrer is priceless 🙂

He is the dialectic.

A show having a conversation with itself.

Predicting the incredulous urban take on yokel homespun rerun.

Mask of Ivan IV’s comrade.

Dancing to await the unfolding of a plot.

Coy joy.

Spider bite at Paranormal Activity.

Slow news day?

Mairzy Doats comin’ thro’ the rye.

Tells Samuel Beckett to leave it in.  The interjection.  [offstage]

Same hair.  And Warhol.

The evil is grease.

And Donna’s all Double Indemnity.

Exploding genres à la James Monaco à la François Truffaut.

As bathetic as Wayne’s World.

Genre explodes.

And no author.

Just Army of God (thanks to FBI curation).

Curare cure air.  Volare.  Hugh Laurie?

Silence of the Lambs got in a little late with Buffalo Bill.

But right on the heels of BOB.

And the psyop B.o.B.

Felt good to burn.

But most touching is Mendelssohn.

SS.

Camera bobbing up and down like ROman Polanski’s buoy.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 2

Carol Reed would have been ruined with such attendance.

But still the theme.

The credits are worse.

No late-period Godard waterfall slow-motion on Boyle and Fenn names.

The most terrifying moment in U.S. television history.

 

-PD

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Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [1933)

This might be the one great key of the 20th century.

The skeleton key, so to speak.

We have one of the great directors of all time (Fritz Lang) laying out the operational details of criminal conspiracies.

But perhaps even more, we have the fine line between genius and madness which Hitler was beginning to toe.

It is important to note that Hitler was synonymous with the Nazi party.

He was their God, so to speak.

And yet it seems to me that Hitler was not particularly bright.

A fiery orator?  No doubt.

But not really a criminal mastermind.

No.  There were others.

Things were just getting going in 1933.

We…

become enthralled by intellect.

As our minds are stimulated, we sometimes lose track of any ethical grounding.

Which is to say, intellectuals are the most dangerous.

I would like to fancy myself an intellectual, but I will let the Order decide that.

Yes, dear friends…there is no other way to put it.

Fritz Lang, the prophet, is clearly delineating a criminal Order which would come to rule the world in the 20th century.

His message is far-reaching.

The methods outlined in Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse are perhaps most applicable today.

The 21st century (which began on 9/11/01).

Terror for the sake of terror.

Hidden-hand machinations.

The man behind the curtain.

It is no small detail.

Every detail drives Otto Wernicke to the brink of madness.

He is the portly J. Edgar of this affair.

In Wernicke’s case, his opposition are mad geniuses.

Literally mad.

Goethes of crime.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge sums up the problem.

Knowledge is inextricable from high-level criminal insanity.

Dr. Mabuse has studied too much.

And so he spools out reams of handwritten blather.

He reexamines language.

Hinting at post-structuralism.

Language, year 0.

Whirls and whorls and squiggles.

And slowly the comatose “brains” of the operation finds himself a new body.

Each one well-paid.  And each compartmentalized in their knowledge.

We must come back to Max Weber for this one.

A couple of times the word.  simuliert.

The prospect.

That he could be faking it.

Madness.  To avoid the punishment he deserved.

But it seems rather that the psychiatrists have been infinitely engrossed in the case histories of their patients.  [Which is to say in their patients themselves.]

The psychiatrists have the secrets of the 20th century.

And the science rolls on.

On the one hand, we have Ewen Cameron of Project MKUltra.

On the other we have Dr. Steve Pieczenik.

And it is at this point which we need to discuss the counterintelligence apparatus of the Order:  2-B.

It’s not Abteilung.  Something different.  Less significant.  But tasked with the dirty work.  The cleanup.

Mord.  Murder.  Nipping the stragglers.  There’s no leaving the Order.

And so is it any wonder that Goebbels (or Garbage, as Charlie Chaplin rechristened him) had Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse banned in Germany?

Why?

Because it gave away all the secrets.

The secrets of control.  Each level glued together by terror.

And the controlled chaos.  The buildup of addictions.  The incredibly farsighted chess game of our conspirators.

The reign of crime.  A lusty pronunciation.

Vs. a homicide detective wont to sing strains of Die Walküre here and there.

Germany split in two.

Soon enough.

And something as simple as a love letter.

When one least expects it.

Few films deserve the label masterpiece quite like this one.

 

-PD

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British Sounds/See You at Mao [1969)

Bloody fucking bollocks!

I’ve wanted to say that for a long time.  I’ve said it before.  But it looks better in writing.

It has a sort of permanence to it.  Yet we never know.

Why the non sequitur expletive?  Because this film is a brilliant expletive deleted.

Long ago…in a galaxy…in OUR galaxy, as a matter of fact,

there were some clever blokes (?) who called themselves the Dziga-Vertov Group.

Chief among them, of course, was Jean-Luc Godard.

But it is telling that he wanted his celebrity subsumed by something greater than himself.

Ach, Gott!  Fuck this.  I have caught myself slipping into a routine voice.

A routine voice will tell you nothing about this film.

And so we come to the crux of this experiment:  struggle.

Film is a struggle between images and sounds.

In a Godard film, even images struggle amongst themselves in a feeding frenzy.

It is a manifestation of a mind trying to process the unfathomable complexity of the world.

In the film under review, it is especially the sounds which cannibalize one another.

But this is not new in Godard films.  Always, ALWAYS…there is a plethora of content.

Like a honey ant ready to explode.

[                                                      ] Space left intentionally blank.

Analogous to paragraph.

If you are thinking poetry,

you are not far off.

We miss the mark daily.  It is not a Christian confession.

There is not a way to look over the summary to this film on Wikipedia.

In that sense, I am offering a service.

Yet, I am giving you a very subjective, personal impression of this film.

I write film criticism which strives to harmonize with each individual film under consideration.

In other words, each film must be reviewed differently.

There really isn’t, despite a tendency to the contrary towards generalization, such thing as

a film like all the rest.

Yet I have my patois.  My schtick.

Take it or leave it.

Only know that the message is under continually scrutiny.

Self-criticism of film criticism in a controlled system seeking to explain it all.

If you are looking for the answer to the question,

“Who’s in control?,”

the answer is,

“No one’s in control.”

I’m sure my friends at the CIA will agree with me on this.

To clarify, I have no friends at the CIA (that I know of).

Speaking sequentially and descriptively with deference to “plot” is useless here.

We have lost the plot.  [Thank God!]

And so a guitar can change he world.

And some extremely-advanced students can change some Beatles lyrics (months after The White Album was released).

You must struggle in the mud.  Mud and blood.  Le sable et le sang.  Rimbaud.

I failed miserably.

And she was hoisted into the air on a Panavision boom.

Nude ascending a staircase.

This just in…THREE LEVELLERS SHOT BY CROMWELL IN BURFORD…

ORIOLES DEFEAT WHITE SOX IN BOURGEOIS VACUUM

Ah,…now I am weeping for the revolution…or for the auteur.

But the auteur has given us a lasting oeuvre.

Was Truffaut’s only English-language film Fahrenheit 451?

It matters.  Here.  …et ailleurs.

I am weeping for the old auteur…before he’s even gone.

And next I will view but not review.

Solely my own experience.  To remember where I started.  (which is basically where I am at this very second)

I have not moved an inch.

It is essential to see British Sounds.  To hear British Sounds.

As an English speaker.  In April 2015.  You won’t even need the Italian subtitles.

They are telling us we are losers.  THEY they.

I have no message.  “Too many messages.”  –Harry Partch

I am just floating on the waves of free association.

Go on:  call me an amateur.

A lover , not a fighter…who didn’t claw his way up to gargle in the rat-race choir.

He lives.  Let me check.

He lives.

Regardless.

And we have no way of communicating with our fellow man.  The life sucked out of the 21st century.

This is by design.

“Separation is the alpha and the omega of the spectacle.”  –Guy Debord

I present the conspiratorial view of history applied to cinema.

Paranoid nonfiction.  I have never read Dick.

Quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.  The difficulties.

Such a quintessentially British euphemism.

The Troubles.  Northern Ireland.

We know nothing.  It’s not as easy as shot/reverse/shot.

It’s like the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).

KGB calling it a CIA false flag.

Need we remind the perceptive reader of world history that Dr. Ewen Cameron was being paid by the CIA to carry out hideous psychiatric experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute on the grounds of McGill University in Montreal as part of Project MKUltra over a period of time which overlapped with the activities of the FLQ? That is established fact and not a conjecture with which the KGB had any connection.

And so the question becomes, as Godard and co-director Jean-Henri Roger ask, [to paraphrase] “Is Marx the best weapon with which to confront the situation before us?”

Baltimore is haunted by the past (capitalism).  China is haunted by the present (vestigial communism).  In America there is no present moment (minus the times when reality erupts within the spectacle).  In China there is no past.  Not really.  It is forbidden.  Communism requires the primacy of the present moment.  History is history.  Gone.  Capitalism requires the continuation of the past.  Inheritance.  Both suffer from the status quo.  Capitalism is no longer capitalism…and communism is no longer communism.  The great irony is that monopoly capitalism and totalitarian socialism are no longer easily distinguishable (if they ever were).  Why more people don’t seek out the power elite of this two-sided conspiracy coin is beyond me.

Fear.  Fear prevents us.  Only the dispossessed have what is called courage.  Rage.  Courage.

-PD

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In Like Flint [1967)

It all started with Errol Flynn.  Flynn, accused of statutory rape by two under-age girls in November 1942 was defended by (among others)  the American Boys’ Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn.  That’s right:  ABCDEF.  One member of the organization was William F. Buckley, Jr.  Ah Buckley…not the heroic Bill Buckley who died in Beirut (after helping to expose Project MKUltra).  Nay, we speak of the harpsichord man.  The Knight of Malta (like Ronald Reagan). 

In 1943 (that is, the next year) the Buckley in question would go from ABCDEF (Z.O.W.I.E. anyone?) to being a student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.  After a short stay, he entered (?) WWII out of U.S. Army Officer Candidate School and soon enough (at war’s end) was at Yale and in the loving arms of Skull and Bones (being a member in good standing). 

Buckley was recruited by the CIA in 1951.  The story goes that he served just two years, but strikingly one of those two was back in Mexico City as a “political action specialist” in the Special Activities Division under E. Howard Hunt.

Now there’s a name…  Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy (what is it with these guys and first initials?), engineered the first Watergate burglary on behalf of President Richard Nixon and his administration.  That is to say:  in 1972 the President of the United States of America’s “people” broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.  In on this whole thing was another fellow keen on the aforementioned self-referent nomenclature:  L. Patrick Gray (the acting head of the FBI at the time).

This immense tangent serves to set the stage for what is not really that great a movie:  In Like Flint.  Yes, the phrase is thought to have originated in reference to good old Errol Flynn (the demigod [not to be confused with demagogue] of our friends the ABCDEF).

All of this is to say that the “plot” of In Like Flint is beyond fanciful (and utterly jaw-dropping in its dated sexism).  Yet, every day the machinations of strange organizations with nefarious plans swirl around us in orbits mostly unnoticed.

I must say that I preferred the direction of Daniel Mann’s Our Man Flint to the staging here of Gordon Douglas.  Don’t get me wrong:  there are some priceless moments herein.  At one point James Coburn utters the phrase “an actor as President…” (as if the whole thing seemed too preposterous to be real).  Of course the U.S. would go on to actually have an actor as President when Reagan assumed the position for the majority of the 1980s.

The tape recorders in hair dryers idea bears a spooky resemblance to what the other Bill Buckley observed at McGill University in Montreal (under the horrific guidance of Dr. Ewen Cameron):  that is to say MKUltra. 

More light-hearted is Coburn’s hilarious “dolphin talk” near the top of the film.  Fans of The Illuminatus Trilogy will doubtless find this particularly poignant. 

Spy Chief Framed As Libertine…  This brings to mind the strange case of Gen. David Petraeus.  In the film, intelligence (?) chief Lloyd Cramden is stoned and dethroned in just such a manner by a junta of which Gen. Carter is head.  Once again Flint shows his boundless talents (including a stint as hypnotist and another as a ballet dancer).  Rahm Emanuel would surely be proud.  Leave it to the polymath Flint to deduce female cosmonauts from a cardiograph (80 BPM) on Earth. 

Coburn as a Cuban is definitely a knee-slapper.  And there is plenty of eye candy (as in the appropriately-named Operation Smooch).  All in all this is great downtime for spy and enthusiast alike.

-PD 

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On Her Majesty’s Secret Service [1969)

Lazenby.

Not Connery.  Not Moore.

After the bloated disaster of You Only Live Twice, my expectations were not very high.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

This is perhaps the best Bond movie up to this point in the series.  I know it is blasphemy to say so.  I love Connery.  I adore Moore.  The achievement in question is perhaps best attributed to the director (new to the series in this capacity):  Peter Hunt.

Telly Savalas is masterful as the cat-petting Blofeld.  He adds a depth to the character which was missing in the previous depiction by Donald Pleasence.  It is interesting to note the similarities of Blofeld’s allergy institute (a cover for brainwashing) to the CIA’s dirty program Project MKUltra which was headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.  The ghastly “research” was administrated from 1953 onwards by Dr. Gottlieb.  Blofeld’s methods in this film bear a striking resemblance to those of MKUltra’s head experimenter Dr. Ewen Cameron.  The world can thank CIA agent William Francis Buckley (“Bill”, but not the one of which you’re probably thinking) for blowing the whistle on this dark, dark period in CIA misadventure.  Buckley observed the deplorable results in Montreal at McGill University.

But back to fun stuff 🙂  High-speed chases!  The Bond series from Eon Productions redeems itself with a great ski chase down Piz Gloria (atop which is Blofeld’s “clinic”).  While not as epic as the underwater battle in Thunderball, it is much more entertaining that the autogyro sequence in You Only Live Twice.

I really must compliment Lazenby.  His was no easy task.  It was the right decision for him to not speak in an affected Scottish accent after Connery.  Lazenby could have been a great long-term Bond.  Thankfully he contributed this one fine performance to the annals.

Peter Hunt is to be equally (if not more so) congratulated.  This was a unique ending for a Bond movie.  It was handled deftly and had just the right amount of suspense to keep the incredulous at bay.  I’m speaking of course about 007 getting married.  You’ll have to see it for yourself to find out just how Eon Productions managed to finagle a continuance of the series after this “blow” to the womanizing lead character.  Of course, in today’s world marriage wouldn’t be a hindrance at all in a similar dramatic case.

This film is really an odd duck, but it should stand as an example for the series.  It is a bit humorous to hear John Barry give the famous 007 guitar line to a harpsichord in the opening credits.  The effect is similar to “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.”  Louis Armstrong even sings a song especially recorded for this film!  He was near the end of his life and it is as touching as Billie Holiday’s album Lady In Satin.  Armstrong never recorded another song (dying two years later from a heart attack).

 

-PD

 

 

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